Tuesday Roundup & Notes

Pepperdine (35-20) will face the No. 3 seeded Bruins (30-26) at 3 p.m. Host Long Beach State (37-18), the regional's No. 1 seed, will meet No. 4 seed Illinois-Chicago (34-19) at 7 p.m.

Two games will be played on Friday, Saturday (3 p.m. and 7. p.m.) and Sunday (2 p.m. and 6 p.m.), with a possible winner-take-all game on Monday beginning at 6 p.m.

Tickets will go on sale Tuesday beginning at 10 a.m. and can be purchased by calling the Long Beach State ticket office at (562) 985-4949. All-session tickets will only be made available until the start of the regional.

The winner of the Long Beach Regional will face the San Diego Regional beginning either June 8 or 9 at a site to be determined.

UCLA won both games against Pepperdine during the regular season. The Bruins defeated Pepperdine, 6-2, at home on April 17 and won, 4-1, in Malibu, Calif., on May 8.

The Bruins will make their 14th appearance in an NCAA Regional, marking the program's first back-to-back NCAA Tournament berths since the 1999 and 2000 seasons. Last season, UCLA finished 1-2 as the No. 2 seed at the NCAA Tournament's Malibu Regional at Pepperdine.

Playing just a short drive south on the 405 Freeway, the team will have some home-field advantage with a big fan base at its games.

"We’re really excited," Curtis said. "It’s a tough regional. It’s close to home so we’ll get a home crowd. You always want support from the family members and friends."

Still, playing close to home presents its own set of challenges to coach John Savage’s team. He noted that being so near to the team’s home turf is a mixed blessing. Whereas a postseason road trip takes the players out of their lives temporarily, playing so close to home poses a lot of potential distractions. Last season the Bruins did not do as good a job at avoiding the distractions as Savage would have liked.

"Having a lot of support and a fan base is the best thing you could ask for," Savage said. "You just don’t want distractions. You don’t want players focusing on the Major League Draft, you don’t want them focusing on ‘how many tickets I have to get for this crew.’ Sometimes when you get sent out (on the road) you don’t have those (distractions). We have to do a better job of keeping distractions down and making sure that we’re focused on the regional."

This regional will be the second consecutive regional that could be dubbed a "freeway series" for the Bruins. While UCLA received the No. 2 seed for the second year in a row, some of the team was let down that there were no plane tickets to book.

"Everyone wanted to travel a little bit (and) get out of the state," Brummett said. "But a regional is a regional; you can’t be negative about it. We’re excited and ready to go out there and compete."

What in the hell is going on with the UCLA rankings? Fox has them in the top 10, Athlon at number 15 and Lindy's at number 22, while Rivals and the AJC don't even have the Bruins ranked. That's a pretty wide disparity. UCLA is the only team that cracked the top ten in one poll, that didn't make it onto everybody's top 25 list. For my part, I can't get the FSU ass-whipping out of my mind. If UCLA intends to play the way they did last year (and I haven't really seen enough to think that this year's team would be better), then I think the Bruins are #24 or #25-ish projection, if they make the list at all.